2017 – Year of the Book

Join me and The Whole Megillah in making 2017 The Year of the Book. Join a community of emerging and established writers of Jewish content. Share your goals and progress, your challenges and satisfactions. Whether you write for adults, kids, or somewhere in between, isn’t it time you got that book written and sent out into the world?

Let’s make this easy. There are no rules, no word count thresholds to hit. Just commit to a book project by commenting to this post. Update us weekly, monthly, quarterly—whatever interval makes sense to you.

Here’s my overly-ambitious personal plan for books in 2017:

Revise and find a home for my Holocaust-related YA novel in verse.

Revise and find a home for my Holocaust-related YA novella.

Find a home for three PB bios.

Write a new PB (just came up with it during last night’s insomnia).

Write a new MG book (came up with this idea during a previous bout of insomnia).

Finish and submit my proposal for an academic book about dance marathons.

Find a home for my poetry chapbook, Chicken Fat.

I’m revving up all cylinders to have at least one book “sold” by December 31, 2017.

Who’s with me? Who wants to come along on this Year of the Book journey?

Yiddish Language, Culture, and History

Meta

The New Yorker Article about Children’s Holocaust Books Folks have been buzzing about Ruth Franklin’s New Yorker article, “Transported.” You can read it here. You can also access information about children’s Holocaust books published in the United States and Canada … Continue reading →

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What inspired this collection? Carol Davis (CD): I don’t ever think in terms of a collection before I put it together so I can’t say there was a specific inspiration for the collection as a whole, … Continue reading →

I recently returned from a week at the Yiddish Book Center as a participant in the TENT program for children’s writers and illustrators. This incredible program, sponsored by PJ Library, was a journey of soulful explorations, academic discussions, and emotion-filled … Continue reading →

The Whole Megillah caught up with busy author and teacher Lisa Romeo last month at a coffee shop in northern New Jersey. I asked her for her top tips in writing memoir. Here are the results of our conversation, fresh … Continue reading →

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What has led you to write memoir? What are the greatest challenges and the greatest satisfactions? Mimi Schwartz (MS): I had been writing fiction and poetry until we spent a year in Israel in 1972-73. There I … Continue reading →

Yes, I know this is not a craft book or a work of literature, and there’s no Jewish content here. But I present these two books here in the interest of spring cleaning and renewal. I’d heard about Marie Kondo … Continue reading →

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What prompted you to write this book? Janet Wees (JW): When I visited the memorial site of The Hidden Village in the mid-2000s, it affected me more than other sites I’d seen; it gave me a … Continue reading →

I attended a session at the Princeton Public Library three weeks ago about writing the memories of others. The speaker, professor and memoirist Ellen G. Friedman, shared her family’s story: seven of her family members escaped east into the Soviet … Continue reading →